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There's a reason you don't revisit your favorite childhood video games
When my mom passed away, I was the sole one responsible for cleaning up her house. I don't have any siblings and I didn't know my dad; as far as I knew, he was dead. So it fell on me to handle her affairs. I'm not the most organized person, so I have to say, it was a pretty intimidating task. I started with the usual stuff, getting her affairs in order, taking care of the funeral arrangements, everything you have to do up until the body is buried. After that, it was just a matter of going through all of her stuff, piece by piece. To say my mom was something of a hoarder would be an understatement. Okay, so she was hardly reality TV worthy, but she hung onto a lot of junk. It was overwhelming going through everything, but I won't lie, it felt nice. Each little trinket was a memory. Even the tattered doily she saved brought back warm feelings of my childhood Halloweens, when she would lay it out on an end table where we kept the candy bucket. I spent a few days going through all of it. She had a shed in her backyard, a sizeable thing where she kept most of her knickknacks. It was cold in that shed, holes in the side of it letting in freezing winds. I wore my thick jacket and worked into the night, just me and the twin sounds of wind and shuffling boxes. Before long, I let my mind wander to the loneliness of my task, and the decreasing light outside. I hadn't even realized it was getting so dark, and I kind of freaked myself out thinking about the wind whistling through the holes in the walls. I was more drained than I realized. There were plenty of boxes still to sort through, but only one left on the ground. Determined to finish this one and then enjoy my night, I lifted the lid and was pleasantly surprised. Inside was my old Nintendo and a stack of games. Now, I'm hardly a gamer. I have a current console, and I use it for one series that my friends and I play regularly, but that's about it. As a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, but I remember my mom splurging one Christmas and getting it for me. I only ever owned a few games, but I played the Hell out of them. I remember my days bunny hopping in The Adventure of Link, and was really confused why they changed the gameplay for Legend of Zelda. A friend had to tell me that Adventure of Link actually came second, which blew my mind. Link was the main character; why wouldn't they title the first game after him? I had five, and I remembered them all too well, the warm feeling of sitting in front of our TV coming back to me as I pulled them out of the box and slid them out of their sleeves, that satisfying sound of plastic scraping against plastic bringing a smile to my face. Final Fantasy, where I spent hours trying to perfect the right party. Adventure Island, which I always replayed just to use the skateboard. Ninja Turtles, which I beat as every character. There were five that I remembered so vividly, so I was surprised when I pulled out a sixth game. The cartridge was black instead of the usual gray, which seems like it should've sparked my memory right then and there, but it didn't. It didn't help that the title on top of the cover had been worn away, leaving me with just the art. As I stared at the image of a sinister figure clutching a tombstone as he rose from an open grave, it came back to me. I used to play this game every day. I had enjoyed it because it was kind of dark. It felt like a forbidden thing that I shouldn't have been allowed to play. The whole thing took place at night, and I remembered having to explore a dark castle to kill a demon. Thinking about it, I couldn't recall exactly what made it so dark, because it wasn't like Final Fantasy didn't have skeletons and monsters. That really annoyed me. It's like trying to remember someone's name that you see every day, but it's stuck in the back of your head. For something that I had played all the time, it was unacceptable that I couldn't remember more than first entering that imposing castle, let alone the title of it. Right then I decided I needed to try it out again. I wanted to relive those glory days, find out what I'd forgotten. In my head, that castle was an imposing sight, fully realized in beautiful graphics; part of me just wanted to see how much of my memory was tainted by rose-colored glasses. There there were two old CRT TVs in the shed, but only the small black one worked. I set the it down on a barstool, plugged it into an extension cord and ran that along the floor to the only power outlet in the shed. I got the Nintendo hooked up too, attached the AV cables to the TV, the controller to the console. Everything powered on just fine. I stared at the fuzzy penguins on the TV – a little joke my mom and I had, that the static looked like a bunch of jumbled up, fuzzy penguins. I pressed the channel button until I switched over to channel 3 and was met with a black screen. I was feeling kind of excited as I pulled the cartridge from its sleeve. It reminded me of Christmas morning, getting a new game each year. My mom was always so happy watching me unwrap it. She always knew just what I wanted because she'd bring home old issues of Nintendo Power from the houses she cleaned, and I'd tell her stories about all the cool games I saw. Of course, I was always behind the times on the cool new games, but I didn't care, because I loved what I had, no matter if everyone else had already played them. The lid popped up with a satisfying click, the springs squeaking ever so slightly. The mystery cartridge slid in, plastic scraping the sides of the machine, chipset clicking in. I pressed down, pushing the game into position, and hit the reset button. Nothing happened. I was still staring at a black screen. Panic rushed through me, not a real or earned panic, but panic all the same. The thought that I might not get to play this game, have to forever go without being able to remember the title, filled me with existential dread; it's hard to let stuff like that go without it nagging at you forever, or at least for an extremely annoying day. I breathed and told myself it would work, pulling out the cartridge and doing the same thing every kid with a Nintendo was all too familiar with. I blew into it. It looks like you're trying to play it like a harmonica, but it gets the job done. Lo and behold, I popped it back in, pressed the reset button, and the screen flashed as the game booted to the title screen. But it was just an image of that imposing castle. How could a game not include its title on the title screen. It didn't make any sense. There was only one option on the main screen, press start, so I pressed it and was met with an ominous beep. Music began, a bass-filled chiptune like an operatic orchestra; I'd never heard anything like it, didn't even think it was possible to make something that wasn't high-pitched on an 8-bit system. The screen faded out with a pixelated wash of colors. There were no text boxes explaining my quest; I was just dumped right into a forest. My character looked like an average person, just wearing plain pants and a shirt. He looked nothing like the typical fantasy heroes: knights in armor or Belmonts carrying whips. I hit the right arrow and my character started walking, while I checked out what my buttons could do. 'A' jumped, but 'B' did nothing. My character didn't seem to have an attack. I didn't remember jumping on enemies to kill them, but, then again, I didn't remember much of the game at all. There was a white square at the top of the screen that sat empty. For a NES game, the forest was creepy as Hell. It started with a low layer of fog across the ground, an impressive effect for the time it was made. Bats flapped towards my character and he ducked underneath them. The further in he got, the worse the forest became. Skulls hung from trees, candles in their eye sockets burning away. Headless skeletons burst out of the ground. I hit jump and my character landed on a skeleton, managing only to hurt himself – that obviously wasn't how I killed things. He hopped over the rest and continued along the path. I was expecting a boss, but the character reached the edge of the screen and it went black and the music stopped. Pretty anti-climactic. But I was in for a treat. This was what I remembered. The music came back, low and moaning like Gregorian chanting, as my character approached the massive castle featured on the title screen. The drawbridge lowered as my character approached. I felt uneasy stepping across the wooden bridge. The music stopped, unsettling me as all I could hear was the wind creaking through the holes in the shed and trees overhead whipping the roof. The screen changed as the character stepped past the gate, and then he was inside the castle, greeted by a terrifying digital screech of pain. The noise almost made me stop playing, the high pitch at once grating and frightening at the same time. It felt real, like the developers had digitized an actual recorded scream. But more than that, I could feel the pain behind it. I depressed the right arrow button and continued trudging on. The castle was nicely lit, almost welcoming if it hadn't been for that scream. There were no enemies at all. The level continued scrolling until I hit a staircase, and the game took control and sent my character down the steps. The screen transitioned out into a courtyard full of tombstones. It was a veritable graveyard, with a spooky tree that reminded me of the spindly-limbed oak in my mom's backyard. A set of tombstones ripped themselves up from the earth and stacked together into a walking sepulcher. The music roared with a tune fitting for a boss. The walking tombstone monster spewed bones out at my character, which had a startlingly hard pattern to avoid; I could already tell that this was one of those games that didn't go easy on the player. I hoped maybe it was just one of those obnoxiously difficult first bosses, because I didn't really feel like spending all night in the shed. It didn't take me long to get into the swing of things though. In fact, it felt like muscle memory in action as I deftly dodged all the bones without taking a single hit to my character. When the first barrage was finished, I noticed a flashing bone left behind on the ground and walked my player over it. Voila, I had my first weapon, a bone icon neatly filling the white box at the top of the screen. I pressed 'B' and launched a bone in a downward arc. It smacked the tombstone boss and its body flashed bright white for a moment, satisfyingly marking a successful hit. Each salvo gave me a single bone to hurl at the boss. I missed once when the thing started flashing red and changed its attack pattern, adding a jump into its repertoire, but otherwise it was a perfect run, and the boss finally crumbled before my character. A grave was left unearthed in the ground. Certainly they wanted me to go inside, but my instincts told me to stay put, because who would hop into an open grave? But the game didn't give me a choice, because it took control of my character again and he walked over, jumping right into the hole. The screen turned black and “Level 2” appeared on the screen. My character dropped down into a dark cave. Right away, I noticed that something was very off. I was in a dungeon, not all that different from ones I'd seen before, but the decorations were very advanced, and far more detailed than what I thought possible. Chains lined the walls, torture instruments too. I had to jump onto a pillory and use it as a platform to reach a higher floor; I couldn't shake how dark this felt for a NES game. Robed men carrying whips charged at my character. I had to duck beneath their attacks and then jump over their heads to continue. My character barged through a door, and I continued on as normal. The candles lighting the dungeon walls grew dimmer with each passing step. There were dark splotches of purple on the walls that I could barely make out, which I took to be an artistic choice to add depth to the otherwise blue tones of the dungeon. Then everything faded to black except my character. I waited, jumping in place like I usually did whenever I had to wait for a game to continue. The boss appeared faintly at first, blinking into existence. Then he flashed onto the screen, fully visible and horrific. Despite the pixel art, I could still tell that this giant man was supposed to be an executioner. He was covered in bloodstains and wore a black hood. A tremendous axe was in his hands, dripping with little red pixels. The background came back onscreen, and my eyes went wide. Even by today's video game standards, this wasn't tame. There were severed heads and viscera everywhere, gutted bodies hanging up on chains. One person was still alive, his legs missing, his torso disemboweled, and yet I saw his sprite screaming and clawing towards the screen as if begging for me to help him. The executioner laughed. I was in a bit of a daze, and took some hits from the boss, but I got his pattern down quickly. I had to run forward whenever he jumped and slammed his axe down to get underneath the weapon. Just like the tombstone boss, each impact of the axe would create a flashing stone pickup onscreen that I could throw at the executioner. It only took six hits to kill him, and the whirlwind attack he added when he was close to death was dodged simply by ducking. My character walked offscreen, and text flashed again on a black background telling me I was on level three. It looked like I was still in the dungeon, but things had gone from bad to worse. I realized now that those purple blotches I had thought were shadowed bricks were actually bloodstains. The torture devices were filled with squirming people, their digitized voices begging for release. The enemies looked like more of the same torturers but dressed in leather armor instead or robes. However, I soon realized that their outfits were scandalously made of straps, and they appeared to have their genitals exposed as well as they could be by 8-bit graphics. Whenever one of the enemies approached me, if there was a torture victim between him and my character, he would whip the victim. Chunks of flesh would break off in showers of blood, and little pixels representing their skin landed on the ground. Exposed bone would be left behind from their flensed skin. I accidentally hit 'B' when I meant to jump, taking a hit from a guard as he ran into me. Then I realized weapon square was filled by a bone icon. The torture victim my character had been standing in front of had a hole in their leg where their femur used to be. I almost felt disgusted when I realized I had been the one to rip it out. I kept going, throwing the bone at one point, just wanting to get it out of my character's hand. I needed to finish this level, I needed to see how far this game went. I couldn't imagine it getting much worse, and yet, I was starting to remember bits and pieces here and there. The dungeon seemed familiar, and I even thought maybe I remembered the torture victims, but my young mind hadn't processed what was really going on or how terrible it was. What I found most alarming was the thought that my mom would've allowed me to play such a game. It took me longer than it should have to make it out of the dungeon; I was distracted by the sprites actively being tortured in the background art, being stretched out on wheels or burned alive or shoved into iron maidens. But I got through it all and reached the end of level three, grateful that there wasn't a boss waiting for me. What was there was so much worse. Level four started with a pair of sprites, two flesh-toned characters I took to be humans, but one was massive. The giant one was thrusting into the smaller character. I wretched in disgust as the big creature stepped away from the small one, leaving it a pile of gore. It laughed and ran away, and I finally had enough. I turned the machine off angrily. It was too much for me, went beyond the realm of a video game and into pure tastelessness. I flicked the light switch and went to the house. I needed to calm down a little bit. My adrenaline was pumping. I felt like a little kid seeing something completely forbidden. It was probably how I felt when I actually had been a kid playing that garbage game. After having a drink, I got online and started doing a search. I tried maybe three dozen permutations of search terms, anything I could think of to describe the game or the cover art. I wanted to find out what it was called once and for all. But nothing came up. I'd found stuff this way before, but no matter how many details I gave nothing came up that matched. I would get Castlevania or games like that, articles about games banned for violence and sex, but nothing similar to what I'd just played. It was like the game didn't exist. That got me thinking that I had something special on my hands. Maybe it was greed, but if this game was one of a kind, some ultra-rare cartridge that next to no one knew about, I could make some decent money to help pay for all my mom's expenses. I saw a picture of us together on her mantle and smiled at it. I never realized how odd it seemed that the corner of the picture looked like it was missing someone. An hour passed, maybe, and I went back to the shed to retrieve the game. I stepped inside and flicked the lights on. The TV came on instantly. Weirdly enough, the NES did too, without me touching anything. The game booted to the start screen. I stepped over to turn the machine off, but before I could touch the controller, there was the same ominous beep I had heard when pressing the start button, and the game began. I thought that maybe it was playing a demo, like how a lot of those older games used to do. The problem with that theory was that the character onscreen wasn't moving. He just stood there in his yellow shirt and blue pants right where I had left him. Curiosity forced my hand and I picked up the controller. As I expected, this level got even worse. The torture became sexual in nature, sprites in the background forcing themselves on others in masses of pixelated flesh. The enemies appeared to be nude women bound in bondage gear, their limbs twisted so that all they could do was walk towards me and make anguished groaning noises beneath their masks. About halfway through the level I was given a whip and used it to attack the bondage women, but it had the opposite effect than what I expected. The enemies squirmed and writhed when they were attacked by the whip, then just kept coming even as their sprites reddened with blood. I jumped and dodged the rest of the way, trying to ignore what I saw in the background and just focusing on reaching the end. A boss awaited me, the same big man from the beginning of the level. He was fast and constantly laughing every time he charged my character. He would lash out with a whip occasionally just to throw me off. I dodged, but no weapons ever appeared even after a minute of this. The more I stared, the more I noticed my character. It was just odd how unremarkable he was for a video game character. Brown hair, yellow T-shirt, blue pants. I looked down; it was actually exactly what I was wearing. In my distraction I got rammed by the boss, but this wasn't a normal encounter. Normally, my character would flash, bounce back, and then be controllable again. This time, when he touched me, the boss grabbed me and pushed me over. I lunged forward and turned off the console just in time to avoid the image onscreen. I breathed a sigh, utterly traumatized. Then the game came back. I had been staring at a black screen, and now my character was standing there like nothing happened, being laughed at, and the boss music was coming through the TVs tiny speakers. I leaned forward and turned off the TV. The button clicked beneath my finger and the picture faded away. I couldn't believe my eyes, but the TV turned back on too. It had to be something up with the wiring, I told myself; there was no other explanation. This time, I had a weapon in my hands. I noticed my health had a sliver left. Acting quickly, I pounded the 'B' button, throwing daggers at the boss until he died. It was over, and the game moved onto the next level. But I'd had enough. I hit the power button on the console, but the light remained on no matter how many times I pressed it. I did the same to the TV, but it wouldn't turn off. I tried unplugging them both, but they stayed on. By this point I was breathing heavily and completely freaked out. I pulled the AV cables out of the TV, hoping that would stop it. Certainly there was no way for the console to display its image on the TV if there were no cables connected? No such logic there. I got up and switched off the power to the shed. The lights turned off, and for a moment I felt a rush of relief. But I saw the glow of the screen out of the corner of my eye and knew it was still on. Angry now, I popped open the lid and pressed down the cartridge, fully willing to just rip the thing out. But the mechanism wouldn't release. It was completely stuck. That was fine. I could just leave it on and let it sit. I didn't have to play. Except my character started moving even though I wasn't touching anything. I watched him travel through a short dungeon corridor, expecting horrible things. Surprisingly, my character reached the end, where a bright light was shining. He stepped through and was back outside. Maybe it was a stupid idea, but I picked up the controller. I wanted to see what was coming next. It looked like the start of the game, but I assumed it was a new area. I didn't walk far before I approached a house. Not a medieval house, but just an average, modern, suburban home. I grew up in a house like that, a house like my mom's. In fact, I was at that house right now. I walked to the door and went inside. It wasn't just like my mom's house, it was her house. The walls were painted the same, the furniture was the same; I swear there was a picture on the mantle that even looked like the two of us together. There were no enemies as I explored the living room. I noticed toys scattered on the floor, trucks and blocks. The TV was on, playing fuzzy penguins. The toys moved as I walked through them, kicking them out of the way. As I approached the TV, a dark shadow on the wall behind it twisted and moved until it turned into the shape of a dark figure with curved horns and sharp claws. The shape skittered along the wall, then jumped out towards me, crushing the toys on the ground. I ran, fearing for my life. It was artificial, but I felt like I was in real danger. The screen changed and I entered a bedroom. It was a child’s bedroom, walls papered with dinosaurs, more toys scattered across the ground. One toy in particular stood out, a teddy bear with its head ripped off. I looked over my shoulder at the open cardboard box of stuffed animals I had sorted through earlier that evening. My ripped apart bear sat just on the edge, barely in my view. I shook and looked back to the TV. As I approached the virtual bear, the toy lifted off the ground, the body first and then the head. The head twirled around in the air for a moment and then reattached itself. A moment later, the bear grew in size, or maybe I shrunk. The shadow creature's claws burst out of its hands, horns ripping through the top of its head. It chased me back the way I had come. The screen transitioned, not to the living room this time, but to a hallway. I found myself walking towards an open doorway. Outside, a female sprite was crouched down and crying, her face in her hands. I thought this was odd after everything else I had seen. In fact, the whole thing didn't make sense, but at the time I wasn't really thinking about it. I just braced myself and entered the room. It was a bedroom, darkened save for a bolt of lightning coming from outside the window. The flash of lightning illuminated the shadow figure sitting sullenly on the bed. The room returned to darkness, and then another bolt filled it with lasting light. This time the shadow took on the shape of a man, completely normal looking. He looked up at my character, who was looking more and more like me by the second. Even composed of simple pixels, I could tell the boss was glaring at me. He threw down a glass bottle which broke, and then stood. I tried to move, but my sprite was frozen in place, just like I was as I watched the boss approach. I was definitely smaller than before, and shrinking still, becoming no taller than a child. I watched as the boss removed a belt from his pants and held it tightly in his fist like a whip. He approached me, appearing to reach for the front of his pants. I wasn’t sure if it was to hold them up or pull them down. Still frozen, unable to think, unable to breathe, I watched in horror as the boss grabbed me and the screen faded to black. A tear ran down my cheek as I listened to the sound effects playing in the background: the crack of a belt, a child crying. The darkness faded, and I realized I had control again. The boss was sitting on the bed facing away from me. I had a knife in my hand. I took a step forward, clenched my teeth, and pressed the ‘B’ button as hard as I could, relishing it as the knife flew into the boss’ back and killed him in one hit. He fell on the ground, blood spilling across the floor. The screen faded to black and credits began to roll; within moments, the background changed to the cemetery from the beginning of the game. Someone was digging. It was the crying woman, and she was shoveling dirt out of an unmarked grave as the boss lay dead beside it. Above them, the crooked tree loomed ominously, a crow nestled in it. I tried to make sense of the words onscreen, but the names were garbled nonsense. I didn’t care about solving this mystery anymore. My trembling hand reached for the power button on the console. This time, the thing turned off and stayed off. I pulled the cartridge out as quickly as I could, putting it in its sleeve and shoving it away in the nearest box I could find. I packed the NES in with my other games and left the shed with the box in my hands. I couldn't get away from that shed fast enough. As I stepped outside, walking towards the house and the light from the back porch, I stopped by the old spindly oak tree, dead and missing all its leaves. I stared at the ground by its base, watching and waiting as if I expected something to happen. I closed my eyes, my whole body shivering, and then ran into the house. I still never learned the name of that game. I stopped looking after that night. I never opened the box I put it in again, just donated the whole thing. Playing that game reminded me that there were some memories better left buried. Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta